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PAX Game Re-Cap: Best of Show By: PoisonRamune, the Apathetic Lizardman PAX made me realize that I’m not a fanboy. Aside from the development company, I couldn’t tell you which specific people made my favorite games. I mean, had I not been introduced to Tim Cain (of Fallout 1 & 2 fame) as “Tim ‘not Fallout’ Cain, just kidding” I probably would have never cared about meeting him at the convention. The same went for Ron Gilbert, creator of Monkey Island who I actually insulted at the TellTale Games booth, since I didn’t really know who he was and decided to tell him that “I wasn’t a big fan of that shit (Monkey Island).” After seeing Ron Gilbert’s DeathSpank I feel as if I can make amends for my PAX faux pas, since this does seem like one Ron Gilbert game I could actually get into.
As Josh and I have mentioned in previous articles; we love the concept of the point and click adventure game, but kind of hate the implementation of most. Most point and click adventure games suffer from the problem that the only challenge they offer is requiring you to be patient enough to try every item/character combination possible to advance. Of course, most of these games often have a near logical cause and effect flow. However, some games have solutions that require you to try things that make absolutely no sense (I’m looking at you, case 3 of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trials and Tribulations).
DeathSpank solves this problem of adventure games in adding fun action RPG elements to the mix. In the game you play as the titular character, DeathSpank who’s probably on some item collecting quest of some sort. You go about visiting various locales while killing various baddies with an assortment of physical and magical attacks. Like with any good RPG, you can allocate stat points to customize your character as you see fit. Because the demo at the show was not playable, I was not able to see how in-depth the stat system was. Though I was assured by the man giving the booth presentation that the fighting system and RPG elements weren’t going to feel half assed or tacked on.
The adventure game aspects of DeathSpank seemed pretty standard, as most of the scenes shown were fetch quests in progress and that typical LucasArts “pick the best/funniest response out of 3 choices” formula. This in itself isn’t bad, since I honestly enjoy the writing in the Monkey Island games and other SCUMM based LucasArts games (I just hate the pacing, since it’s like hammering your way through a “choose your own adventure book”). The fact that this game has everything I love about adventure games (clever writing and a motley crew of bizarre characters) without any of the crap that I find boring gave me a lot of hope for this in the future. I was even going to try to build a gaming PC so I would be able to play this as near to launch as possible; however, after doing some research I found this will also be coming out to PS3 and Xbox360 as well as the PC (which is good for me, since I always feel like my most desired games are only available on for the PC). And now for a little WTF... Yeah, I took this segment from Gavin, but I’m genuinely pissed off about a contest that was held at the DeathSpank booth. In order to garner fan support and make it look like their booth was hotter than it was, the DeathSpank people were holding a contest where at the end of the show they’d be giving away 5 vinyl/resin cast statues of DeathSpank himself. To win, you needed to collect 6 various buttons by visiting the booth 2 times a day each day of the show, by collecting the 6 pins you were then able to add your name to be entered into a lottery styled drawing. While they were pretty strict in the distribution of the buttons (as they gave Aspen, friend of RwN and my roommate during PAX a hard time for getting “absentee” buttons for Vivian), they pretty much made the fans’ loyalty and devotion moot at the time of the drawing. In a strange bit of coincidence, 3 of the people they announced as winners were not at present at the drawing (while you didn’t need to be present to win, it made me wonder how badly those morons really wanted that statue) and the fourth and final statue was given to some random guy in the crowd without anyone verifying if he had even been participating in the pin collection. The random jackass’s “Ebay, bitch!!” comment led me to believe that he probably wasn’t participating in the contest at all and was most likely there because the show was ending and all the other booths were closing up. To add a smearing of shit on an otherwise piss filled contest, the fifth statue wasn’t even given away and if I remember correctly it didn’t even exist.
So in hindsight, maybe I’m glad I insulted Ron Gilbert. I mean, I feel he was part way responsible for this failure of a contest as he was the goon that drew the names. However, since one of the lackeys at the DeathSpank booth was the one that gave the final statue out to the random jerkwad, I guess I can’t use not buying DeathSpank as a way to punish them. I’m still getting the game, since it does look pretty sweet.
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